Most companies have a website these days, or in the very least know the importance of having one. The purpose of having a website is to make people aware and interested in what you have to sell. Odds are that you’ve heard the term “conversion rate” before, even if you’re not really sure what it means or how to get it. When building a website, it’s important to understand conversion rate if you want to make your website work for you, rather than having it simply be a digital brochure.

Conversion rate works hand-in-hand with search engine optimization (SEO). By using well-targeted keywords, you can amp up how often your website appears in search engine results. The more your website comes up in results, the more likely people are to visit your website. A high amount of people who convert from visitors to customers starts with getting people to your page. If you’re unsure of how to write SEO content yourself, hire a content writer who’s familiar with search engine optimization.

Once people land on your website, you have the chance to boost your conversion rate. The home page is where you should concentrate most of your efforts to improve your conversion rate. If you don’t grab visitors’ attention on your homepage, you may never have another opportunity to turn them into customers again. You want to prevent visitors from closing your site before becoming a customer.

You want visitors to be able to make sense of your website, and quickly. Don’t make your visitors work to find out what products you sell or services you offer. There are plenty of competitors out there no matter what business you’re in, and visitors will quickly find a site that’s easier to navigate if yours is too confusing.

Don’t bother using confusing headlines. While you may think they’re clever or witty, they’re in fact unclear and often annoying for visitors to navigate. Unless you’ve built a huge, well-known brand that utilizes several equally well-known phrases, stay away from tricky wording. Make your headlines short, to the point and larger than the rest of the text.

Don’t clog up your homepage with distracting animations, videos or too many images. If you want to include a gallery of images, create a page specifically for those photos and link to the page on your homepage.

Utilize the proper hierarchy on your homepage. Assume that most visitors won’t scroll down. This means that all of the vital information needs to be on top of the page, or “above the fold.” Secondary information can be located farther down on the page and in a smaller font than the more important info.

It’s best to regularly update your website, whether it is a new design, adding content or making a blog post. A stagnant website won’t turn up in search results as much as websites that have been recently changed. Search engines index pages higher up on the list if they’re updated frequently.

By designing a website that is user-friendly and easily navigable, visitors are much more likely to stay on your website and convert. If you make your message clear and enticing, you have a better chance of attracting customers.

In order to start allocating your online marketing budget, the first and most important step is to look back at last year’s performance.  Depending on what metric you used to gauge success (return on ad spend, cost per lead, gross leads, etc.) you’ll want to make sure you’re increasing the budget for the top performing channels.  That should be a no-brainer.  Whatever was working last year, do more of it!  If you don’t know what was performing well in 2011, then it is definitely time to invest in tracking and analytics.

If you are currently unable to track where leads/sales/activity are coming from, that is a valuable place to initially invest.   The advertising channels you are investing in won’t be as effective if you aren’t able to gauge the performance.   Whether you need to change how your website collects leads or simply install analytics, it is important to know what investments are paying off and what ones just aren’t working.

Now that past performance and tracking analytics are in place, now comes the evaluation of different marketing channels.

SEO

With the implementation of the Google Panda algorithm in 2011, Google wiped out a lot of businesses small and large by demoting them within search results.  With the constant push towards wanting to promote ‘quality’ in their search results, relying on organic search traffic from Google is becoming increasingly less stable if you’re not following best practices in SEO.  If the time and money you are investing in SEO are on “black hat” or even “gray hat” practices, Google made it clear that those efforts will do you more harm than good in the long run.

If Panda taught us anything, it’s that diversification is going to be critical to long term survival on the web.  This isn’t really anything new and is generally a smart business move.  You never want to have one customer that accounts for too much of your revenue because if that customer leaves, then your whole business tanks.  To put that in internet marketing terms, you never want to have one traffic source accounting for too much of your traffic, because if that source dries up, it could be very difficult to replace.

Branding/Public Relations

Investing in branding should be more top of mind these days than it ever was.  Publishing press releases and alerting relevant media members of your content are two quick wins that can help you quickly become more like a traditional brand.  Anything a company can do to increase the percentage of visitors that come from branded searches is a long term win.  This is something most big brands have and the more ways you can imitate a big brand online, the better it will be for the long term health of your business.

Paid Search

Unlike organic search, you don’t have to worry about waking up one day and not appearing in Google at all (unless your Adwords account gets banned, which is a totally different issue).  Paid search is not only a great way to attract new customers, but is also a very valuable competitive research tool.  Not only can you quickly find out which keywords generate the most traffic, but you can also find out how those keywords convert.  You can utilize this information in your organic search campaigns as well to determine what keywords you want to focus on targeting the most.    By investing in paid search, you can see immediately which terms are driving traffic and whether or not they’re converting.  If you’re not already investing in paid search, it’s definitely worthwhile as it will not only lead to more sales or leads but it will strengthen and reinforce all of your other marketing campaigns.

Display

Retargeting via display ads is a tactic that has started to gain popularity lately, and for good reason.  The opportunity to interact with potential customers after they’ve visited your site is extremely valuable.  There are many advanced tactics one can utilize with retargeting, but if you’re just getting started then at the very least create a campaign for people that have visited your sign up page or check out page and didn’t end up signing up or checking out.  Those visitors were so close to converting that it makes sense to do all you can to get back in front of them.

Another benefit of display advertising is that it helps pump branded searches.  If people see your ads all over the web, they’re more likely to keep you in mind when they’re looking for something in your industry.  Anything you can do to increase your brand’s visibility online is a good thing.

Content Creation & Social Media

These two can be lumped together as they go hand in hand.  Without great content, it’s tough to provide much value socially (there are actually a lot of great customer service benefits from using social media, although that usually comes out of a different budget, so for the purposes of this article I’ll exclude it).  Creating a white paper you can give away to collect leads and a webinar shouldn’t cost you too much and would be great content to publicize utilizing various social media outlets.  A bad idea would be investing time in social media without investing time in content.  Being on Facebook or Google Plus just for the sake of being on Facebook or Google Plus is a waste of time and hours that could be spent somewhere else.

Other channels

It’s a good idea to save 5-10% of your budget to explore new ad channels.  Facebook and LinkedIn have opened up their own respective ad networks and allow you to get very granular regarding the type of person you want to target.  You could also invest in YouTube videos if you think they might be a good way to grab attention.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube may perform very well, and while there is always the risk that they efforts may not work for you, the point is you need to test to find out for yourself.

So … Where Should I Spend My Money?

While I would love to be able to give a concrete answer, unfortunately like all things internet marketing, it’s all relative.  What may be a good strategy for a B2B company may be a horrible idea for B2C and vice versa.  What may work for a well-known brand may not work for a start-up.

If I had to trim this down to one key takeaway it would be this: Diversify and work towards becoming a brand.  Those two things make everything easier and make the business healthier.

Anyone who has posted a link on Facebook has seen the thumbnail that shows up associated with the link and site blurb. You may notice that it will often give you options to pick the thumbnail you want. You may have even noticed that oftentimes the company’s logo or any relevant picture is not in the list. Where do the blurbs and thumbnails come from, and can you control what thumbnail is associated with your site?

The most basic thing that Facebook does is simply read your page. You should already have a “description” meta tag for SEO, and that is used as the blurb. Any images embedded on the page (through img tags – not included in CSS as backgrounds, etc.) will go into the thumbnail list. You may try to trick Facebook by including a picture but obscuring it, etc., but there is a much easier and reliable way to do this.

The answer is through Facebook meta tags, made available in the Open Graph protocol.  With those meta tags, not only can you specify a picture for a thumbnail, but you can specify real-world location information, your site name, description (that blurb), and more.

There are four required meta tags to make use of the Open Graph: title, type, url, and image. To specify the thumbnail, you need to include the following meta tag in the head section of your html:

<meta property=”og:image” content=”imageurl” />

You can even include multiple instances of this tag to give multiple thumbnail choices. You could change the image seasonally, for promotions, or just to keep your brand current. The tags override the automatic thumbnail production based on the images on your page. Also, note that the first thumbnail shown will be the largest image in the list, so make sure your primary message is the largest image.  This will ensure that when someone shares a link to your site, instead of a random or even unrelated image, the message, brand, or logo you want to portray is there.

Read more about the Open Graph protocol, available meta tags, and image parameters at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph

Is a bad website something that looks like it was built in 2001?  Is a bad website something that is so overwhelming with content that you “click off” the moment you get there because you don’t know where to start?  Is a bad website something that drives you no traffic on its own?  Is a bad website something that nobody can find unless they search for your company name?  Is a bad website something that makes you click 4 times before you get to what you want?  Is it when you go to visit examples of their work and they look old or in some cases you can’t FIND the references they give as “testimonials or case studies”?  Just what does a “bad website” mean and look like?

I would have to say all of the above.  You website is your only resource working 24/7/365 for your company.  It is also a lot of times your only chance to make that all important “first impression”.  You have 7 seconds for them to determine if they will “click off”.  You have to make sure you provide enough and the right content on your business site so they feel comfortable in one of three things – buying something (if you sell), filling out your form to talk to someone – or picking up the phone and calling you.  If you don’t give them what they need to do any of those three (refer to your sales process for what information is needed to get them to make a buying decision) – then you have a “bad website”.  PERIOD.

In a day and age where everybody says they can build your website, search optimize it, handle your social media, and drive you traffic – execution of those strategies makes all the difference.  Just because they “know more than you” doesn’t make them an expert in web strategy – talking the talk is much different than walking the walk.  Make sure you check out their site and the references they give you.  If their site does not have the work done that they are proposing to you and/or you find references to work that you don’t like – run.  If you don’t like their website (and just because it’s better than your current one, doesn’t mean you have to like it) keep looking.  When they are willing to tell you how they will do the things that will drive your website’s return-on-investment (ROI) to new levels (which is beyond just traffic) with specific steps and tasks and give you a list of people to call – follow up with references and ask how much VALUE they received – value being ROI, data, sales, leads, qualified traffic and understanding to move their entire business forward – then you have found someone worth talking to when it comes to “fixing bad websites”.

ConAgra invited food bloggers to an exclusive “four course meal” prepared by celebrity chef George Duran. The bloggers were told the event was intended to discuss trends in the food industry and sample fine wines over a dinner prepared by Duran. What really happened? The “four course dinner” (unbeknownst to the bloggers) was Marie Callender’s frozen lasagna. Despite the bloggers clearly positioning themselves against artificial ingredients and processed foods beforehand, they were still served exactly that. Not to mention ConAgra secretly taped the whole thing to capture their reactions. Bloggers were less than happy with the “bait-and-switch” event and returned to their blogs to let their readers know about it.

Where did ConAgra go wrong? Why didn’t their ruse go as planned like Pizza Hut’s “surprise reveal” commercial? Successful blogger outreach can have significant ROI if implemented strategically. However, there are two important components of working with bloggers that ConAgra failed to do; target the appropriate bloggers and build a relationship with them.  

Before you start building relationships, you need to ensure you are building relationships with the right people. Research the niche you are targeting and find the industry leaders in that niche. Plug into their inner circle and identify who has the most influence. Each blogger has their own point-of-view on things, and you need to spend a little bit of time uncovering whether or not their personality and blog align with your efforts.

Using a tool such as Technorati is a good way to start your search of uncovering highly influential blogs in your niche. Technorati’s blog directory contains over 1,275,000 blogs all ranked with their authority and influence and are also grouped by industry. The authority of any given blog rises and falls as the bloggers’ following changes, allowing you to find current leaders in the blogosphere. You can also compare the bloggers’ authority by running their link profile through a tool URL such as Open Site Explorer.

After you tap into these bloggers, you can continue to identify more leaders by utilizing their blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of that blogger’s favorite blogs to read and follow. The list can be as short or long as the blogger chooses. While you are analyzing blogs, you will start to recognize which blogs you have seen repeatedly on blogrolls; helping guide your search. Track the blogs you want to pursue along with their metrics and a short description of the blog, which will help you compare your findings later.

How did ConAgra choose the bloggers they chose? While it may seem obvious to go after food bloggers for a food product, the company did not think about who actually purchases their product. They invited bloggers to the event who clearly (if they had done their research) were not their target consumer. Several of the food bloggers prided themselves on using fresh, organic food in dishes that they prepare on their own. Did ConAgra and Ketchum think that their “surprise reveal” would be so influential that the bloggers would convert their lifestyles and endorse Marie Callender’s to their readers?

One blogger made her stance clear after the event, “I’m NOT their target consumer and they were totally off by thinking I would buy or promote their highly processed frozen foods after tricking me to taste it.”

The other important key to a successful blogger outreach campaign is to be genuine and honest with the bloggers from the beginning and build a relationship with them. Read their blog. Uncover what it is that they are passionate about. Determine how and if you can leverage that with your marketing efforts. If it is a good match, there will be no need for deceit. Influential bloggers receive invitations to review products regularly. They know that marketers are looking to promote their products; if it is a good product that aligns with their interests and blog, they are generally excited to share it with their readers.

Be transparent and do your research. ConAgra and Ketchum did neither of these things when promoting Marie Callender’s. If you keep these components at the forefront of your blogger outreach strategy, you will be much more successful.

Have you seen the results of a successful blogger outreach campaign in the blogs you read? Were you more likely to try out the product or service because the blogger you follow and trust recommended it?

New Twitter Transition Complete

The first change has been an anticipated one. As of Monday, August 8, Twitter will no longer offer the option of using its old interface. Although the “new Twitter” first became available in September 2010, users still had the option of accessing the old platform up until now. Changes include a new design with @mentions, retweets, searches and lists immediately above your timeline on the left side of the screen. When you click on a profile or hashtag, rather than being directed away from your timeline to a new page, you see the information on the right side of the page. This was a much welcomed change as it allows you to seamlessly maneuver between your timeline and those that you’re following. With the transition officially complete, everyone’s Twitter experience is now on the same page.

New Activity Stream

When Twitter was created in 2006, the whole concept was based off answering the question “What’s happening?” with a to-the-point, 140 character update. Keep things clear, keep things concise, keep things easy. As social media’s popularity grew, users began utilizing platforms in more complex ways and in turn they continued (and still continue) to grow and develop. The newest Twitter development comes from users wanting an easier way to interact as well as monitor interactions, similar to how you are able to use Facebook.

With Twitter’s new activity tab, you can easily view recent retweets, follows and favorites from the people you follow in one streamlined place. This will more than likely make Twitter more intuitive to use, especially for new and “mild” users. You are also able to follow users directly from the activity stream, making the feature even more seamless.

New @username Stream

The new @username stream is similar to the new activity stream, except it highlights only interactions that your profile is involved with. This includes @mention tweets to you, your tweets that have been favorited, your tweets that have been retweeted, users that followed you, lists you have been added to, and more.

Rather than having information that is relevant to you spread thin in many different areas, you can now view it all aggregated in one real-time stream. This makes your time spent on Twitter much more efficient and integrated.

Share an Image Feature

Finally, Twitter added a small, subtle feature that will make a big impact to the ease of posting media rich tweets. Instead of having to use an application such as Twitpic, you can now add photos that are less than 3MB to your tweets with an “add an image” button found directly below your tweet.

This feature seems long overdue as Twitter has always relied on (and received criticism for) third-party application services in order for users to post images. In any case, it is another much welcomed feature to Twitter’s ever-changing platform.

Changes Coming to a Profile Near You

Apart from the share an image feature which is currently available to everyone, Twitter is making these changes available to a small set of users starting today. They will continue to rollout the changes to everyone else over the next few weeks. It should be noted, however, that as of now these changes are only available on Twitter.com and not on mobile devices.

Have you tried it out yet? Let us know what you think!

Looks like the online promotions space is thriving. More and more special offers sites are being created. Google even went and developed their Google Offers product after they failed to buy Groupon for $6 Billion – that’s right $6 Billion. So there must be some value in these promotional tools right? Otherwise businesses would stop using them and Living Social sure has a large advertising budget for themselves.

Let’s look at Groupon.  So if you have a $50 product/service, that you sell for $25 – (it has to be a 50% discount so it is a “good deal” to get approved) and then you get 60% of the $25 and Groupon keeps 40% of the $25.  You are really selling a $50 product for $15 because of the discount and the Groupon percentage – but they are opening relationships for you – and for the most part giving you an opportunity for customer relationship.  So is a $35 acquisition cost on a $50 product/service worth it?  Only you can answer that, but you should run the numbers.  Based on that, I can tell you, it is going to perform close to what it would cost you with advertising dollars spent at that level (but you can optimize for performance over time with advertising).

You will have some instantaneous Branding and recognition, not to mention customer traffic over the 6 months the Groupon/Living Social is valid.  You will always have some existing clientele who will always buy this so it doesn’t reach only new people – unless you are just opening your doors in the market.  This is unbeatable for the new business.

However, I have yet to see a second offer from the same business so you only get to use this once – so pick your timing – if you are not a new business try to use it to boost a slower period and make sure you can handle the demand during the 6 months without losing your shirt.

There is also the FREE money aspect of this.  Like any rebate that is offered, you get a % that don’t use it. So if we use the first example again, you got $15 off each sale and that 25-30% don’t end up using it, that is FREE money for you to keep, which doesn’t hurt and softens the blow – but then you don’t get that all important “new” customer relationship either so it is kind of a double edge sword.

Here is a great case study.  We had a client use Groupon in December 2010 – a single location Hot Yoga Studio as part of launching their business and they sold almost 700 at $39 a pop.  That is incredible for a small business that is just getting going.  Now, it gave them some cash in the door and created some relationships.  They considered it a huge success.

My take, if you are opening a new business or want to launch a new product or want some quick cash – put an unbelievable offer out there through one of these and you should get some traction. Also learn from one before you try to do another – Set up some tracking on your website that sees what these people do that come to your website via this campaign and track their habits.

Be prepared to use it as a loss leader to get access to new customers and get “legs” underneath your new product or location. Also make sure your ongoing marketing turns those new relationships into repeat customers so you can make some money back and it creates success for the long term. That might take a second promo for them for another visit – but you don’t have to give Groupon their 40% this time.

Let us know if you have had success with one of these services – please give location and product/service sold and if it has been successful in generating repeat business.

How much actionable information do you have about your web visitors? Can you predict their wants, goals, needs and behavior? Are you using analytic data to improve website performance? Do you utilize any re-targeting, ad networks, Search Engine Marketing (PPC and Display) and social media to be collecting data across multiple external sites and clickstreams? If so, the potential to deliver targeted content and offers based on their previous behavior and referring traffic source is possible.

You can construct detailed matrix that serve up content based on the family of sites they have visited and the predicted traits and interests that visitors to those sites demonstrate. However, if the first known point of contact with your visitors is their arrival at your site, then predicting their targeted area of interest is a much more tricky proposition, unless you study your own analytics and data (Sitecore, Webtrends, Quantcast, Google Analytics, etc) to come up with them and improve website performance.

Do you perform any A/B testing of two broader offers or content paths on your enterprise level site visitors and see which performs better (ie they look at more pages or end up as a conversion more often).  That is a good place to start, but more organizations have never consider split testing their own website. Doing this would ensure no audience gets excluded or misdirected–and it requires less historical data to drive the offer but allows you to profile how each “path” behaves.

Coming from purchased media like PPC or Facebook, can also shed light into keywords that have “special” needs to be effective, landing pages that get them to take desired actions and demographic profiles of who is visiting based on reporting. Again, this allows you the create a profile on each type of visitor and adjust the “path” accordingly – which will improve website performance .

You tie all of this data together to make the necessary changes to your website and content, navigation paths to drive more usability, click patterns, desired “conversions” that you have established for your website and/or campaigns.  Interpreting data is extremely important to ongoing web success – find a resource to work with that understands this to help set benchmarks and foundational strategy and it will help educate yourself and give you insights to things you could use across all mediums with your marketing and advertising.

Facebook’s privacy policy has long been a controversial issue. In my opinion, if you put something on the internet (especially something about yourself) you need to have the mindset that it could be possible for anyone and everyone to read it. By entering your interests or personal information in your profile – even something as simple as your gender or marital status – you are making it possible for those advertising on Facebook to group you into a “category”, which is then used for marketing purposes.

Now, I don’t know what makes advertisements catered to my interests so creepy. Personally, I think it’s great. Do I want to see ads about fantasy football? Not really. Guys, do you want to know about a great deal on stilettos? Doubt it. The same principle applies to marketers. Why spend your advertising budget on an uninterested audience? Seeking out your target audience is certainly not revolutionary, but once it is applied to Facebook, it seems to make people unsettled. These strategies are done to help you get content you want and eliminate clutter.

How does Facebook target users?

The thing that I think people misconstrue about Facebook’s ad targeting is HOW they are actually getting targeted. It’s easy to think that “big brother” is scouring your every move trying to figure out what type of person you are, but in reality, the only information used is what you voluntarily supply. Let’s say I opened up a dog grooming salon in Detroit, Michigan. I would be able to specify that I want to serve ads to those who report they are living in Eastern Michigan and have dogs listed as one of their interests. Better yet, I could even be as specific as targeting dog owners with the breed of dogs that tend to give me the most business AND set a geographic distance from the zip code of my location(s). Talk about specific, relevant, and cost effective advertising!

Retargeting follows you around the web

Another effective way to advertise to a more appropriate audience is through retargeting. It’s not necessarily a coincidence to see an ad from a website that you might have visited a couple of days ago. Some websites set cookies through your browser when you visit a certain page(s) on their website and can then serve ads to you on other websites while you are surfing the internet after setting this cookie. This is also possible to do through Google Adwords via the Audiences functionality. After putting a tracking cookie on specific pages of a website, display ads will then be shown to individuals who have visited those pages as they browse websites on the Google Display Network.

This strategy goes back to the frequency principle of marketing; people will generally need to see your ad several times (typically 3-7 times based on your demographic and desired audience) before responding to it. By incorporating retargeting into your campaign, you are able to target people who have already established they are interested in your brand because they already visited your website. As a result you will be much more effective in your advertising strategy and budget.

Love it? Hate it?

As a professional marketer, I would rather get content that I can relate to and leave the “clutter” of things I am not interested in behind. As a consumer, would you rather have your interests ignored and have anonymity when it comes to being marketed to online? Or do you prefer to see ads that are tailored to your interests and profile you build by the sites you visit? We would love to hear what you think.